Why I Quit Facebook

I joined Facebook in September, 2007. My 'timeline', when I studied it for the last time yesterday evening, indicated very little activity until around April, 2008, at which point I, apparently, began posting frivolous status updates about my personal life, my tribulations and thoughts, roughly once a week. A style began to emerge over the coming months, one that was hardly original, but, I believe, still above average in the craft and care put into it.

I alternated between displays of grand, bullshitting erudition --one early update was a variation on a Latin motto from Leibniz, transformed for the social-networking age: Qui me non nisi renovationibus status mei in Libro Vultuum novit, non novit ('Whoever knows me only through my Facebook status updates, does not know me')-- and the confessional mode, which I had the presumption to call 'Montaignean'.

I received my first 'like' in February, 2009. I did not understand what it was, or how it got there. I was in Australia, and it was from someone I had known in high school in California.

I'll skip over some history. By 2010 I had an iPhone, and I had taken to checking for likes every minute or so while walking down the street; I learned even to check for them, surreptitiously, while teaching.

The New York Times put up a firewall, and rather than pay the 99 cents per month required to get around it, I preferred to rely on links posted by my friends: I had 640 of them after all, and collectively they surely made up a reliable team of journalists (I'd estimate 30 to 40 of them were in fact professional journalists; another 200 or so were amateur journalists).

A few weeks ago I decided to get back to the four volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu that remained after I miraculously got through the first three a decade or so ago. But when one attempts to divide one's attention between (i) page 801 of the Gallimard edition of Proust's chef d'oeuvre, and (ii) one's ever-refreshing newsfeed: which do you imagine wins? It is cognitively impossible, I believe, not to prefer the newsfeed. It is glowing and changing, and it doses out what it has to give in easily swallowed, sweet little bits.

That was rock-bottom. I had to cut it off, and set about rewiring my brain, to get it back to the way I know it used to be.

I hasten to add that Facebook is among the most remarkable innovations in human history. In the sweep of centuries it, and the variations that emerge from it, will prove to be more important than books. Books were never themselves fundamental to human learning; in fact their massive proliferation in the Renaissance and early modern periods was at the same time an usurpation and a destruction of established and wonderful technologies of learning-- in particular, practices of memorization that would put Julien Sorel to shame.

So it is not that I am sticking with what is true and right, against what is vulgar and corrupted, but only that there are certain projects that I came to value given the precise historical moment of my birth and earliest education, and these projects had come under serious threat as a result of this mighty usurper.

There are other reasons, too, which I would like to list here, from the more personal ones, unique to my own case, to the more general. Some of these have to do with what Facebook had done to me as a user; others with what I see as the troubling failure of Facebook to live up to its real potential. 

I am by nature a melancholic person, and for a long time I asked myself whether Facebook alleviated or exacerbated this condition. I finally determined it was the latter. I like to write and to share what I write, and I like it when what I write receives acclaim. But when this cycle of expression-and-gratification is reduced to a few hundred characters followed by a dozen or so 'likes', it becomes a parody of the creative process, and impedes any real engagement in that process. It calls to mind this painful indictment from Pascal's Pensées, written just as if he could foresee the invention of the 'like' button:

We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.

Typically what I have to say takes about 1500-3000 words; anything short of that is a compromise. I would never have dreamt of sinking into the swamp of Twitter-speak, where one is required by some arbitrary rule to substitute 'u r' for 'you are', and to indulge in other such adolescent vulgarities. But Facebook only partially enables its user to steer clear of texting code. Again, it is not that I do not want to receive gratification from what I have to say, but only that the formal constraints of the status update do not permit me to say it.

Not only for my ability to read, but for my ability to write as well, I began to fear that Facebook was draining away much of the thinking that could have gone into real essays, articles, books. I work in two distinct modes, both academic/scholarly and essayistic/belle-lettristic, and I came to fear that both of them were more stagnant than they might be if I could just pull myself away from the endless exchange of sweet little bits in my social network. But I emphasize that I am really not certain about my final determination that Facebook was an impediment, any more than I am certain that it exacerbated my melancholy: for quite often I had the experience of writing a status update that would then get some thoughts percolating, that would then transform into a blog post, that would ultimately issue in a book review or even, on at least one occasion, a successful book proposal. It's really hard to say whether on balance it was harmful or helpful. I suppose I just need, now, to test the alternative mode of working, and to see what happens when that all-too familiar, all-too inviting salon is no longer open to me.

Another source of frustration, about which I am much more ambivalent, has to do with the nature of the community one forges on Facebook. A few deep and genuine friendships have emerged out of my years there; some genuinely inspiring intellectual encounters have happened there; some rather mundane but necessary networking has taken place there. It would be dishonest for me to deny the good that has come of it, yet recently it dawned on me that I have a number of important connections with people who are not on Facebook, both intellectual and emotional connections, and in no sense do I feel like they are missing something of me, or I of them. Often, when someone I knew on Facebook wanted to discuss something important with me, they would send me an e-mail instead of a Facebook chat message, as if to signify the importance of the communication by moving into this other forum. I expect this sort of communication will continue.

I've said before that I don't think there's anything more 'real' about so-called real-world friendships. Those, too, come and go, and the truth is I have little interest in finding drinking buddies, or coevals to pursue hobbies with. That's not my concern, not my existential mode. All I really want to do is exchange ideas with people; Facebook was often fairly useful for this, but as I've said I began to fear that the ideas were reduced by the medium, and the nature of their exchange, based as it was in the perpetual ejaculation of short witty insights, often made a mockery of the sort of exchange that was held out as an ideal.

(Am I just getting too serious? In my updates I aspired to be funny. But what is funny in this here eulogy?) 

I was comfortable all along with the equivocity of the concept of friend: I had 640 of them, call them what you will, and some of them were in truth my friends. Some others fulfilled other functions, and some did nothing at all but contribute to my tally. Fine. But again, it strikes me now that it was all somewhat like attending a very long summer camp: people come and go, and if anything worth preserving and cultivating should come about, then this will continue once the summer has drawn to a close.

I have mentioned that some of my reasons for leaving Facebook have to do with my own personal concerns, my projects and the way Facebook perhaps fails to facilitate them. I also mentioned that in my view Facebook is failing to live up to its potential. Recently, when I looked at my wall, it was as if 'Family Circus', 'Marmaduke', Penny Saver and Reader's Digest were spilling right off of Gutenberg's own press: such a wonderful and promising technology, descended into pure idiocy just after its first appearance in the world.

I have in mind in particular this new innovation, whereby whatever trashy meme some friend (in a highly equivocal sense) deems worthy of liking, ends up in my own newsfeed with the purported explanation that such-and-such friend has just deemed it like-worthy. Thus, after having fought so hard to banish Farmville and Cityville and shit like that from my wall, I was now being bombarded with misspelled slogans insisting that Marilyn Monroe's curves are in fact more beautiful than Lindsay Lohan's skin-and-bones, or that Obama is alright because he fist-bumps janitors, while Romney by contrast likes to get shoeshines on airport tarmacs (something I truly doubt, by the way). And most recently George Takei, likeable enough in himself, has entirely drowned out, with his good-spirited and sassy mash-ups, any possibility of using that social network for that higher aim for which it briefly held some promise: the exchange of well-thought-out ideas.

All the way back in 2007 there was something about this endeavor that rubbed me the wrong way: it was born of the dormitories, and to some extent it draws us all back into them. Or perhaps I should not say 'back': I was a commuter, to a state school, and I lived with my mother. I never lived in a dorm, and I never showed up in a yearbook, to be judged for my hotness or my plainness. The culture that produced Facebook is one that I never knew, and do not like. An image of that culture invaded, and invades, my mind every single time I hear the name of Mark Zuckerberg's venture, and every time I hear the name of Mark Zuckerberg.

I still believe Internet-mediated social networks will prove to be more important in human history than printing presses. But my social network will not be Facebook.

--

Follow my public Facebook page (i.e., not a page I look at every 15 seconds).

Follow me on Twitter (where I have not logged in in over a year).

Comments

[KindleResearch]

Beautifully put my friend. I think many of us will identify with these downsides but find it harder to part with our dependency. Personally, I feel a need to be part of it but think I'll take a new identity.

[Ben]

Two comments.

1. I wonder if you are giving up the wrong piece of technology? After all, you did mention that your interaction with facebook changed somewhat once you got an iPhone. A number of my friends have suddenly gone from marginal and infrequent users of facebook to high frequency users with the purchase of an iPhone (or smartphone.) As as a non-smart phone user, I hve to say that it's harder to become that caught up in the facebook flow if the device that one uses to connect to it isn't portable. The result is that facebook retains some value as a means to keep in contact with friends and certain organisations.

2. Its probably too late --at least in some circles and professions-- to opt out of facebook. Its quite likely that the critical mass has been reached necessary to change our society and the way we contact, and stay in contact, with each other. I now email certain people only through facebook, which is a stable addresss, rather than through their multiple, constantly changing institutional email addresses. My sports club is looking at using facebook as its main communication for training schedules (coupled with twitter feeds). Friends who aren't on facebook slip through the cracks of event invitations, and announcements.

You will find, if you really do leave facebook, that one day you will find out way too late that someone got married. Or had a baby. Or died. For just like the conversations in bus stops and tea rooms, while much of facebooks activity is purely trivial gossip, some of it will be important.

But surely the most compelling vision of the possibilities of social media is the Arab spring. By giving up facebook, don't we risk be asked: "Why weren't you in Tahrir Square?"

[Norman Costa]

Like. I ate some nachos, today.

[Laura]

These are all thoughts I share. Having attempted deactivation more than once for these reasons, let me say that the problem lies not with the active use of FB, but the amount of crap that one becomes accustomed to viewing as potentially interesting newsstuff. It is possible to keep all the best parts of FB, and block the rest, by deleting certain friends, unsubscribing from groups, adjusting the newsfeed and privacy settings etc. That said, it is incredibly satisfying to spend a week or two living entirely without FB - and probably even more so to log back in and discover how many people really wanted you in their digital social life.

[Sara]

To read NY Times articles you just have to delete the string of numbers following the = sign in the URL.

[Matthew Gamble]

As a dedicated Twitter user, I feel the need to respond to your comments about the quality of English used on the platform. If the people you follow are substituting "u r" for "you are", you're following the wrong people. No one I follow does that. It has also been said that you cannot properly express ideas in 140 characters. I partially disagree with that, but at the same time, most people generally link to a blog post of some form if they want to properly express ideas, instead of trying to fit them into one, two or even five or six tweets.

[Andrew]

Maybe in between Sodom and Gomorrah and The Prisoner, take a break and check out the book Feed by M.T. Anderson. It's a short young adult novel written in 2001 or so, but it does a very nice job predicting where FB-culture is heading, or at least taking it all to an absurd level. Many of the things he predicted for the "Feed" were prescient - the constant updates whizzing by, ever-increasing mix of personalized ads.

[Dermer]

Justin, you're a smart guy, so you don't need me to tell you this, but you don't have to accept anyone as a friend, and you can turn off notifications of or unfriend those littering the conversation. Keeping it down to 10 or 20 colleagues and family members or even those five or six people who surround us and amuse us and render us content makes for a reasonable diversion a few times a week.

Can we have another installment on the life of Jason Boone (still some of your best writing)? A major letdown to learn he was fictional, but I think I've gotten over it.

[DT]

Highly recommended:
A la recherche du temps perdu : L'Intégrale (111 CD) [Coffret, Livre audio] [CD]
ISBN: 978-2878625219

[Philip Thrift]

I'm on the Google Plus Diet: I haven't been on Facebook or Twitter since February 1.

[The Necromancer]

Damn, definitely food for thought here. Facebook is a crucial contributor to the banality of contemporary culture, popular or otherwise. I guess in a world where the internet is competing for what is left of our attention, trimming a bit of the fat can't hurt. I certainly get your sense of alienation from the "dorm culture" Facebook embodies, even though I'm currently soaked in that world teaching at Michigan State. Still, it will always remain something of a foreign land, much like Facebook. Maybe the explorer in me remains drawn to that...